The vendange started a few days ago at the Domaine de Souviou at Beausset in the Var; it produces wine as part of the Bandol appellation and it claims that its grape harvesting is the first to start this year in France. Given the very mixed weather this year and especially all the rain in Provence, it’ll be interesting to see how this year’s wines turn out. Traditionally, the reds and rosés from Bandol are considered the best wines in Provence.
Meanwhile, the general mayhem continues. On Sunday evening, a diplomatic convoy was going from the Saudi Arabian embassy in Paris to Le Bourget airfield. Le Bourget was once the main airport for Paris, a handy nine km from the centre, but these days, it’s mainly used for corporate aviation. Anyway, this convoy was en route to Le Bourget when it was held up by a group of highly organised and well armed men, who were obviously very well informed about the convoy’s movements. Not alone did they rob €250,000 in cash, but got away with a lot of very sensitive diplomatic documents. The unnamed Saudi prince in the convoy was unharmed as was everyone else, but the whole event was a stunning debacle.
Chinese tourists have an incautious habit of carrying lots of cash with them while they are visiting France and the other day, a Chinese visitor at Versailles was robbed of €10,500 in cash that he had with him while he was sightseeing. Given the level of pickpockets in Paris these days, carrying that sort of loose change is very unwise.
People all over France currently wish they had that kind of money. The annual income tax returns are being done at the moment and the latest figures show that well over one million households will be unable to pay all their due taxes in one go. Many households are really stretched financially these days. Given the current dire state of the French economy, it’s no wonder that a poll in last Sunday’s Journal du Dimanche showed that eight out of 10 voters in France have no confidence in the current government.
One former president was in the news earlier this week. Jacques Chirac was a popular president, at least compared with the current one, even though his was not a radical or reforming presidency and he left no great works behind him, unlike the wily Francois Mitterand. But he had the common touch and true to French tradition, had a great way about him with the ladies. In France,he was often called “four minute Chirac” because that’s all it took for him to have sex with a woman, have a shower and say au revoir. These days, however, at 81 years of age, he’s in frail health and on Sunday night, rumours suddenly did the rounds that he had died. Fortunately for him, the rumours of his demise were greatly exaggerated.
But someone who did die the other day was a much respected radio commentator, Ménie Grégoire, who had reached the grand old age of 95. For 15 years, through the 1970s and into the 1980s,her programme on RTL, where she discussed listeners’ most intimate problems and advised solutions, attracted millions of listeners. After her broadcasting career ended, she turned her attention to print, Marie-Claire and the now disappeared France-Soir newspaper. Born in Maine-et-Loire in 1919, she was considered a leader of feminist emancipation in France, deliciously subsversive, yet immensely popular.
Someone who had an amazing escape the other day was the 24 year old from Paris who was holidaying with her family at St-Vaast-la-Hougue, on the Cotentin peninsula, not far from Cherbourg. She went off for a little fun on her paddle board, but got swept out to sea. Despite four metre high waves, winds of up to 40 knots, and falling off her board three times, she managed to survive. Having travelled 100km, she was picked up nearly two days later by a Belgian fishing boat, north of Fécamp. It was a truly remarkable story of survival.
There’s also more strike news in the air, nothing new, you might say, with lots of disruption already caused this year to rail and air travellers. This time, it’s a strike with a difference. Nude models in Paris are threatening to come out on strike in protest at their low pay, about €15 an hour, and poor working conditions. Frequently, they have no proper sheets to sit or lie on and often have to get changed in the loo. Traditionally, the cornet or paper cone was passed around at the end of modelling sessions, to which all the artists there contributed. These tips were a useful addition to the models’ poor wages, but all that was stopped in 2008 in a typical example of bungling French bureaucracy. Since then, the models have just had to depend on their low level wages and now it seems their patience has expired.
But the anniversaries roll on. Already, we’ve seen the 70th commemorations of the D Day landings, in June, 1944, then two months later, the Allied landings in the south of France, which have just been commemorated. On August 25 comes the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Paris. It had all begun on August 18, 1944, with strikes. Métro drivers as well as military and police officers went on strike and within days, the Nazis were routed out of Paris. This August 25, the historic event will be marked in numerous ways, including with a special Mass at Notre Dame and a ball outside City Hall.
Incidentally, another anniversary this month, but nothing to do with France, has passed almost unnoticed. On August 14, 1969, to try and quell a rapidly deteriorating security situation in Northern Ireland, British troops arrived in Derry. But in the longer term, their arrival only made matters much worse and over two decades of intense conflict followed. Yet this summer, the general amnesia about this anniversary is itself more than a little astonishing.
Back in France, I see that lots of figures have emerged to show which regions do worst from tourism. Bottom of the league of tourist earnings is Limousin in central France, despite all its delights, but it suffers from being so faraway from the sea. It’s followed at the bottom of the table by Champagne-Ardennes and Franche-Comté, which is on the border with Switzerland. Also at the foot of the table are Haute Normandie and Picardie. Out of all the regions dependent on tourism, top of the list is Corsica, which has seen dramatic rises in tourism income over the past decade. Nearly a third of its GDP now comes from tourism.
There’s a also a new tourism development in Paris, an interactive map of the city that tells you what films were made were, between 2002 and 2008.About 600 films were shot in the city in that time, about 422 of them French and 34 American, including Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. The other films were all of other nationalities, proving the enduring popularity of Paris as a movie making location. Who can forget the 2001 film with Audrey Tautou, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain? Meanwhile, down in Nice, U2 have been busy making video clips at the famous Victorine studios in Nice, which were hugely important in the early days of film making, before the first world war.
Bono and The Edge own a lovely summer house at Eze-sur-Mer in Provence, not far from Nice. Eze is a wonderful hilltop village, right on the sea and the U2 mansion is a splendid 20 room affair. Bono and famille have been holidaying there every summer since 1993.
Trains too have been much in the news in the past week, especially the spectacular accident caused by a landslide to the Glacier Express near St Moritz in central Switzerland. There’s been so much rain in Switzerland this summer that landslides and floods have been commonplace. This particular landslide had spectacular results, knocking some of the carriages of the train off the track. A total of 11 people were injured; fortunately, there were no fatalities. Even more amazingly, with typical Swiss efficiency, the line was back in operation two days later.
All this reminded me of one amazing line we once travelled on, from Domodossolo in Italy to Locarno in Switzerland, the Centrovallina railway, that extends for 52 km. The journey along the metre wide track takes two hours and it’s an amazing journey. It’s also very popular, with about one million passengers a year. We had been staying in Brig, right on the Swiss-Italian border and went from Brig to Domodossolo through the Simplon tunnel. The 19km tunnel goes back over a century, yet the explosives that the Swiss put on their side of the tunnel early in the second world war, in case of invasion, were only removed in 2001!But going through that tunnel on the train is a very claustrophobic experience indeed, so be warned!
When we got to Locarno, we found a delightful Italian style Swiss city well worth exploring. But we also got a powerful reminder of the power of dreams. Well before we had set foot in Locarno, my wife had a vivid dream of men parachuting from planes into the lake beside the town and it was extraordinary, a few days later, to walk beside that lake and see that exact dream sequence unfold before our eyes.
It reminds me a little of the visual evidence released by Nasa very recently, purporting to show an alien building on the moon, as well as an alien walking across its surface. You never know with these strange appearances-perhaps there is something to them after all!
Back here at home in Dublin, I was very struck by another odd happening. Years ago, especially in rural Ireland, pubs and grocery stores were one and the same place. You went to the pub to get your groceries. Now comes news that a brand new pub has opened in Wicklow Street in central Dublin. It’s aimed at tourists and is called Mary’s, which bills itself as a hardware shop and pub. The fittings all recall the old days in Ireland, but it’s all been skilfully recreated. It’s very authentic, but it’s new, not old. And lots of tourists think it’s a great place to hang out.
Talking above about Swiss efficiency reminds me of the same from Germany, in my concluding story this week. Exactly a decade ago, the Duchess Anna Amalia library in Weimar, in what used to be East Germany, was destroyed in a fire. Some 50,000 books were destroyed, but a further 118,000 were saved and have now been restored. Those books brought back include one by the Polish astronomer, Copernicus, in which he argued that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of the known universe. Also restored are a Bible that once belonged to Martin Luther and the death mask of Schiller, the great German romantic poet. The library is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the director of the library, Michael Knoche, is a little amazed that so much has been restored in such a short space of time. It’s all very gratifying, especially at a time, when death and destruction seems the order of the day in so many parts of the world.